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@kinoCharlino said:
Hey everyone. Interest in a German Alexa Skill has certainly grown and for sure the team has taken notice. .........I'll try to keep you guys updated on if this will be worked on, but won't be able to disclose priority or ETA.

Sorry, but its now more than 7 month ago that you told us these, and nearly a year that Plex announced it.
And you will make us think that there is no news in that directon?
That is far away from a good way to handle Plex Pass owners.

@Barry Ricoh said:
Sorry, but its now more than 7 month ago that you told us these, and nearly a year that Plex announced it.
And you will make us think that there is no news in that directon?
That is far away from a good way to handle Plex Pass owners.

Shifting priorities on the voice control team have delayed the team from getting to German. It's a bigger body of work than other things they have been working on and my understanding is it's not as high priority. Though, I have reiterated with them and the PM that there is plenty of desire among users for this.

@Barry Ricoh said:
But if the priorities are shifting, why not make the existing english Skill available in Germany.
This will be a "5 minute Job" for you (Plex), and i could not see any disadvantage for you.

why's that a 5 minute job? You can tell that by your years of experience in programming alexa skills, I guess?

Well, he is right. I made my own skill for Home Assistant and it's not much more than adding the skill to other markets. Problem is, it won't help you at all. German Alexa does try to handle anything as German it hears. Thus your "English" will be a mess to translate. Or do you wanna try to speak any english word/sentences in german slang?

@Barry Ricoh said:
But if the priorities are shifting, why not make the existing english Skill available in Germany.
This will be a "5 minute Job" for you (Plex), and i could not see any disadvantage for you.

Thank you, I think this is a very good suggestion and have passed it on to the Product Manager for our Alexa feature.

@magenbrot said:
why's that a 5 minute job? You can tell that by your years of experience in programming alexa skills, I guess?

In all reality it could take longer, but no doubt it would be less resources than doing it in German. As long as Amazon allows submission of English language Skills in the German Alexa market, then we might have something here. My understanding is that previously Amazon would only allow the option to release it in German, but that may have changed now.

Alexa currently supports English (US), English (UK) and English (India). Based on the language your live skill supports, we will migrate your skill to other English speaking countries. English (US) support US customers, English (UK) supports UK customers and English (India) will support IN customers.

I have reiterated the demand for this with the Product Manager, so hopefully we'll see it move up in prioritization.

Upon further inspection in Amazon's developer program, it appears they only allow English
language migrations to English-speaking countries. This means we cannot submit an English Skill for Germany.

Which is a good thing. It prevents lazy teams of developers (not speaking of yours - just in general) from spamming the German Alexa market for GERMAN-SPEAKING clients with all Kind of russian, english, or klingonian Alexa skills.

I bet, some would find it cool, but from Amazon's view-Point, a customer who needs to speak English (in Germany) to his or her speech-recognition device will be less satisfied.

Please get the developer booty moving ;-), start to do it in German. The first post of this thread is a good start. I guess they never touched it at all. A lot of other companies are able to do it.

Most of your other products are multi-Lingual... so the Alexa skill is falling behind Plex own standards. Maybe the product manager can explain why this is not a high priority issue - I cannot understand. I you re-design the skill to be multi-lingual, then you never have to touch this again (apart from testing or doing new commands). The more important under-the-hood-backend work can and should continue to go on, but maybe work-force can be shared.

My "small" feature wishes:
-* multiple parallel filters using an advanced mechanism (AND/OR/NOT) combine different categories when using filters
-* more per collection & library Settings for collections, f.e. ignore collections up to x items
-* user defined meta tags which can be assigned to standard tags but which do not get lost when updating the data (example) [I want to add "James Bond" to all James Bond movie titles without marking the titles as not changable; I would add information on different versions (Uncut, Extended, DC) of a movie to the movie title, I would like to add the role of a character, I want to add a user defined collection name without marking the standard field as not changable]
-* flag to limit my search to the actual library which I am in when doing a search
-* German plex skill for Alexa
-* AVM 6490 cable tuner DVR / LiveTV Support
-* PayTV (Sky, f.e.) encrypted channel Support (for Sky customers)

one problem that is holding back a german plex skill is that the current alexa api does not offer the required intent types for german. actors, genres, ... are only available in the us api at the moment. so even if they wanted they can't really do much.

never the less: as so often it is not a good communication from the plex team to just sit and say nothing. and it would not be the first feature that appeared with great fanfare and never got to a point where it was really useful. best example is the sonos support. it is really really lacking...

@justme1968 said:
one problem that is holding back a german plex skill is that the current alexa api does not offer the required intent types for german. actors, genres, ... are only available in the us api at the moment. so even if they wanted they can't really do much.

never the less: as so often it is not a good communication from the plex team to just sit and say nothing. and it would not be the first feature that appeared with great fanfare and never got to a point where it was really useful. best example is the sonos support. it is really really lacking...

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